Re-directs and SEO Best Practices

We are currently in the middle of adding Lincoln to our dealership brand and would love some feedback!

Our dealer principal is purchasing multiple URLs containing the new dealer name. There are probably about 30 or more URLs that we currently own and we don't have them set up on re-directing to our main website.

I am curious to know, if I re-direct every URL to our main site...how will this affect our SEO?

Will it confuse Google?

Or is it better to have multiple URLs all pointing back to the same website?

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Candace, it isn't about hiding what you are doing from Google, but they do use some of their "free" tools to put together who owns which sites. Just some food for thought, we quit using their tools on some of our microsites and all of our rankings went up including the main site.

Ashley - first, yes a 301 is a permanent redirect. 302 is temporary. Knowing what kinds of URLs you own, yes, the best idea for you for all of them is to use a 301 redirect on all of them. And as far as your concern for Google cracking harder on SEO... Matt Cutts himself said that you can use thousands of 301s and it won't hurt you, as long as you aren't creating a bouncing string of redirects... like doing a 301 of site a to a 301 of site b to a 301 of site c, etc. Also, in response to try to hide what you are doing from Google - don't bother. Stick to white hat SEO strategies. Trying to be sneaky will only bite you in the ass.

Ashley. I want to address the use of google's tools, don't use them completely as they track this and put it into SEO rankings if you want to get multiple sites up make sure you use tools that the search engine can't track to what you are doing.

Thank you all for your words of wisdom!! Everyone has provided me with valuable information!

Joey and Candace-all these URLS are brand new. They were purchase for (1) in case of typos) and (2) so competition doesn't beat us to it.---there were typo URLs purchased as well as .net .co .us .biz and etc

Richard---I hadn't thought of using them as redirect/tracking mechanism---I have currently been using Google's URL builder tool to track campaigns.

Tim-thank you for the blog link! I had heard Google had been cracking harder on SEO which was my concern for the multiple URL's...

You are right they can be a double edged sword, but if you run your statistics correctly and don't let google or bing know that they are your sites as well they tend to work very well. You still need to concentrate on your main site but with all of those domains I would only 301 the misspell's and use the others as another site. Also I would do a blog with updates atleast twice a week.

Micro sites are a double-edged sword. They take your focus away from, and provide little benefit to the main site. They're also an extra cost; usually being more expensive than just simply adding a page on your main site. Often times, it's simply better to have domain name variations 301 redirect to your main site rather than to landing pages. Just over a month ago, Google cracked down on Exact Match Domains (http://searchengineland.com/low-quality-exact-match-domains-are-goo...) so they're unlikely to provide you any value at all on their own.

However, if you have them for long enough and you develop them well, they simply are good links. In order to get them to be of value, you'll spend more time on the micro sites and less time on your main site, which is NOT where the time should be spent. Having them means you have control over those links, nothing more.

If the goal is to get the main site to rank for [Lincoln] search terms, then the best strategy is to simply have content on your site about Lincoln.

If the goal is to eventually switch your primary domain, or collect those that misspell your URL, then a 301 works just fine.

Hey Ashley great questions. Not sure if everyone is aware yet, but google hasdevalued exact match domains. So as long as the domains in question are just for the purpose of securing the dealers actual name only (to prevent competition from acquiring them) I would that is a fine strategy and that simply redirecting them to the primary domain would be fine.

I would not recommend building 1 page landing pages with the domains as these will get flagged as either spam or gateway pages which could devalue the primary domain. (BAD!)

Right now the best approaches are showing to be to focus all of your seo to the primary domain (use of subdomains is also ok with the right strategy). A blog on a subdomain is fine. Passing some lite seo to your social media profiles to help with page one domination is fine. But the bottom line is that you want your landing pages to exist on the primary domain where your website is.

Hope this helps.

Also, if you would ever like to just talk through a real strategy you can always give me a call. I would be happy to chat with you for an hour or so. No strings. No sales pitch.

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